Issue No. 198 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a book with powerful insights on four nonprofit board scenarios, plus what to do when your horse is dead! And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Sensible Foolishness
This week’s book says there are four basic scenarios for nonprofit boards and three types of governance. Please keep reading—there will be a test at the end of our class.
“Governance by Fiat” is the first scenario, say the three co-authors of Governance as Leadership. That’s when trustees displace executives. Here the board does staff work. Sometimes the staff is incompetent so the board jumps in. Often the board enjoys staff work. Either way, it’s dysfunctional.
“Governance by Default” is the second scenario. Here both the trustees and the nonprofit executives disengage. No one has their eye on the governance ball—and the important work of governance is minimized. Left undone, it’s a train wreck waiting to happen.
“Leadership as Governance” sounds good, but it’s cockeyed. Here the nonprofit staff displace the trustees. The CEO and/or senior team make decisions that should be in the governance arena. This happens frequently with founder-led organizations and “good old boy” boards. Often, the organization appears to be operating smoothly. Internally, this dysfunction never ends well. Sooner or later, someone will pay.
The fourth scenario is the healthy one, what the authors call “Type III Governance.” Here the trustees and executives collaborate. Each understands their appropriate roles, but unlike most boards, the staff affirms the board members when they upgrade to “generative thinking.”
So what’s “generative thinking?” The authors use a variety of definitions to explain this cognitive process of excelling boards: sense-making, reflective practice, framing organizations, personal knowledge, etc. I liked “sensible foolishness” the best.
Generative thinking goes beyond “fiduciary governance” (Type I) and beyond “strategic governance” (Type II). This “Type III” approach typically involves three steps: 1) Noticing cues and clues: different people can take the same data and arrive at different meanings; 2) Choosing and using frames: understanding the “fuzzy front end” of a product development process, for example; and 3) Thinking retrospectively: the counter-intuitive high value of “dwelling on the past” to understand patterns that might impact the future.
“Generative thinking is essential to governing,” the authors point out. As long as governing means what most people think it means—setting the goals and direction of an organization and holding management accountable for progress toward these goals—then generative thinking has to be essential to governing. Generative thinking is where goal-setting and direction-setting originate. The contributions boards make to mission-setting, strategy-development, and problem solving certainly shape organizations. But it is cues and frames, along with retrospective thinking, that enable the sense-making on which these other processes depend.”
Yikes! Think about this final zinger from the authors: “And a closer examination of nonprofits suggests something else: Although generative work is essential to governing, boards do very little of it.”
To order this book from Amazon, click on the graphic below: Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards, by Richard P. Chait, William P. Ryan, and Barbara E. Taylor.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Of the four board scenarios, where is our board? Scenario 1: Governance by Fiat; Scenario 2: Governance as Leadership; Scenario 3: Governance by Default; or Scenario 4: Leadership as Governance? Where do we want to be in 18 to 36 months?
2) The authors comment, “in their ‘day jobs’ as managers, professionals, or leaders of organizations, trustees routinely rely on generative thinking, so much so they have no need to name it or analyze it. They just do it. But in the boardroom, trustees are at a double disadvantage. Most boards do not routinely practice generative thinking.” They add, “When it comes to generative governing, most trustees add too little, too late.” Do you agree?
Promote the Dead Horse! - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Results Bucket, Chapter 1, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to recognize that when the horse is dead, it’s best to dismount!
Here are a few nuggets from the 21 things that we often do when we discover that the horse (a tired out program, product or service) is dead:
--Raise the standards for riding dead horses.
--Create a training session to increase our riding ability.
--Compare the state of dead horses in today’s environment.
--Change your definition of rules by declaring, “This horse is not dead.”
--Hire new staff members to ride the dead horse.
--Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
--Provide additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
--Do a cost-analysis study to see if riding dead horses is cheaper.
--Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
--Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
--Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
For the entire list of 21 ideas, download "When the Horse Is Dead, Dismount" from the Results Bucket. Check the Top-5 answers you often hear in your organization! (From the book, Into the Future: Turning Today’s Church Trends Into Tomorrow’s Opportunities, by Elmer Towns and Warren Bird)
P.S. On October 11, 2010, I will be presenting a keynote session at the American Marketing Association’s Nonprofit Marketing Conference in Chicago on “Mastering the Management Buckets.”
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